Friday, January 19, 2007

It's now confirmed that the new iPhone will be a closed platform. More of an iPod than a Mac really, which as a potential third party developer I view as a disaster. However I'm still hopeful, the phone has these widgets you see...

Andy Ihnatko of the Chicago Sun Times is one of the select few to have been hands on with the iPhone, and he's managed to confirm that while the iPhone widgets aren't exactly the same as OSX's Dashboard widgets, they do use the same technology. You can also build them using Dashcode, although presumably not the currently released version. As Andy says this really does hold out the hope that the widget layer at least will be open to third-party developers.

A few years before that he caused a privacy scandal by uncovering that your iPhone was recording your location all the time. This caused several class action lawsuits and a U.S. Senate hearing. Several years on, he still isn't sure what to think about that.

Alasdair is a former academic. As part of his work he built a distributed peer-to-peer network of telescopes that, acting autonomously, reactively scheduled observations of time-critical events. Notable successes included contributing to the detection of what—at the time—was the most distant object yet discovered.